Richard Pearlman, who died Saturday at 68, was among the foremost opera directors, and as director of the Chicago Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, among its foremost opera educators.

Emphasizing an innovative and sometimes experimental approach to opera starting in the mid-1960s, Pearlman staged Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” with a combination of live action and film effects. He added a live boa constrictor to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” During the overture of his 1971 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” at the San Francisco Opera’s Spring Opera Theatre, Pearlman had a local troupe of female impersonators called the Cockettes, dressed as Edwardian-era divas, climb out of a trunk. The critic John Rockwell, reviewing the performance for the Los Angeles Times, said he loved the Cockettes, and added, “The chorus passes out cotton candy and other edibles to the audience during the finale. Somehow, it all works.”

The company’s Vienna-born general director, Kurt Herbert Adler, had at first refused to allow the Cockettes onstage, but eventually relented and the show was extended for 10 performances. When Pearlman was invited back the following year to direct “Barber of Seville,” Adler asked him, “Vut about using those vunderful transvestites?” It was a story Pearlman loved to retell.

Despite an interest in artifice and humorous staging, he was hardly an iconoclast. “Opera is the music,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “If you try and go against that, it never comes out right.”

Pearlman grew up in Tucson, Ariz., and majored in English at Columbia University. After graduation, he served a series of apprenticeships with titans of opera and theater, including Gian Carlo Menotti, Franco Zeffirelli, Luchino Visconti, and Sir Tyrone Guthrie.

In 1961, he was directing a chorus for the Chicago Lyric Opera in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” when the director, Mr. Zeffirelli, abruptly cabled his resignation. Pearlman was thrust into directing his first opera, which happened to be Joan Sutherland’s Chicago debut.

Pearlman’s formal debut came in 1964, when he directed the first American staging of Hector Berlioz’s “Beatrice et Benedict” for the Washington Opera Society during the 1964-65 season. He served as a staff director at the Metropolitan Opera until 1967. He then became general director at the Washington Opera Society, where his 1969 version of “The Turn of the Screw,” with live action and film, created a lively debate.Some loved its avantgarde feel, but the Washington Post’s critic complained that Pearlman had “gimmicked it up to the point where, finally, the staging blots out the meaning of the story.” In 1982, he remounted his production of the Britten work at the Eastman School of Music with his thenstudent, Renee Fleming, in the cast.

Tired of what Pearlman said was “the constant headache of going out and hustling $1 million a year,” he spent the next few years as a freelancer, directing as many as a half-dozen productions at venues throughout North America. In 1971, he directed the first professional opera staging of the Who’s “Tommy,” for the Seattle Opera, starring Bette Midler.

Between 1976 and 1995, Pearlman was director of the Eastman Opera Theater at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. He then went to Chicago, where he continued to handle young talent, and heard up to 500 auditions annually.

Along the way, he produced a rewritten version of Gioachino Rossini’s “La Cambiale di Matrimonio,” which he titled “The IOU Weddings”; he directed Claudio Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea” set in Mussolini’s Italy, and staged Britten’s “Albert Herring” as a parody of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory England.

Like any good showman, he remained conscious of the bottom line.

In the book “Fortissimo” (2005) about the Lyric Opera’s training program, Pearlman told author William Murray,”The first thing you have to ask yourself in auditioning singers is whether this is a sound people would pay money to hear. If they don’t have that, what’s the point?”

Richard Pearlman

Born July 17, 1937, in Norwalk, Conn.; died April 8 at a Chicago hospital of lung cancer. There are no immediate survivors.